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Cloudways is a cloud platform offering support for organizations that need to run web-applications. Competing with other web-application hosting services like Pantheon and Pressable, Cloudways offers applications such as ecommerce, content management systems and blogging platforms.

Basically the idea is that if you're a content producer, you can rely on Cloudways to ensure that your site stays up regardless of traffic spikes, application updates or security issues. Instead of picking a standard cloud or hosting provider and doing the heavy lifting of the application-specific stuff yourself, you rely on Cloudways to do that for you.

+ Also on Network World: Elastic cloud apps are great, but how do we protect the containers that power them? +

The interesting thing here is that the standard model for hosting—for example, a Wordpress blog—is for an agency to do the design, deployment and management. Instead of a bespoke offering, Cloudways is attempting (as are the other similar players) to "productize" all of the minutiae around application hosting.

That is actually a tougher problem to solve than one would imagine. Everyone who uses one of these applications has a slightly different setup—the large range of plugins and themes available creates huge management complexity that Cloudways needs to resolve.

Cloudways and its ilk, therefore, tread a fine line. They support the platform itself, but they are not actually application developers. I've always found that with my own website this creates an issue around who is responsible for site issues: Is it a hosting issue or an application one?

A fully managed cloud hosting service for containers

Either way, moving up the value chain from raw infrastructure is a good thing, and Cloudways has done well to build a strong, scalable platform. Part of doing so has been via the use of cutting-edge technology approaches, and we see this again today with Cloudways introducing a fully managed cloud hosting service for containers.

With instant provisioned infrastructure from Kyup, Managed Container Hosting on Cloudways allows developers, designers and ecommerce store owners to deploy websites on auto-scalable​ infrastructure and ensures web apps continue to stay online during traffic spikes. This is a case of Cloudways taking advantage of the auto-scalability that comes with Kyup containers. It also sees them leverage quick-scaling RAM, SSD storage and dedicated IP addresses.

It is an interesting case study for Kyup, a pure container player (i.e., not containers on top of virtual machines), that is a spin-off from Siteground. According to Pere Hospital, CEO of Cloudways, there are some distinct advantages to Kyup when compared to more traditional cloud platforms:

Nearly instant server provisioning. 

Instant scaling with no downtime (huge improvement over VMs).

Rule-based auto-scaling capabilities in the context of a single server (again with no downtime). This means a very affordable, load-balanced farm equivalent without all the hassle of elastic load balancing, auto-scaling groups, shared storage and database layer.

Live migration, meaning a server is instantly restarted in new physical infrastructure if the original goes down.

Better performance per dollar (due to containerization).

Hospital provides an interesting commentary on the state of the container-based hosting market:

"We think the likes of Kyup are breaking ground when it comes to the future of infrastructure. Elastichosts tried it a while ago but didn't succeed. Joyent has similar capabilities but was a tad behind. And most other players haven't done yet any significant step beyond VMs."

All apps are deployed on Cloudways ThunderStack, a hosting recipe specific to the company. On Cloudways Container Platform, the company claims that websites run 300 percent faster than deployment on other cloud platforms. It's an interesting case study that goes beyond the usual container players and delivers real benefits to end users.

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Source: Cloudways choses Kyup to power its container-based hosting